Dan Fesperman - The Double Game

I’m not quite sure where my answer came from, probably some old paragraph from a long-ago rainy Saturday, author unknown. But it made all the difference.

“It’s in a burn box in the corner.” I nodded toward a shelf where Ziegler piled his old newspapers. “It’s set to activate in two minutes.”

A burn box is a spy device. You throw your secrets inside and lock it up. If anyone comes to take them, you push a button or punch in a number to incinerate everything inside before the enemy can retrieve a single scrap. My assailants knew this as well as I did, and my words created such an alarming sense of urgency in both of them that for a single decisive moment they forgot all about me and rushed toward the corner.

I darted out the office door toward the broken glass at the front of the store. They were still shouting and thrashing around as I stepped into the cool Vienna night.

Free. But for how long?

Looking left, I saw a van twenty yards away, engine running, passenger door opening. I set off in the opposite direction, giving it everything I had, all of the old Emil Zatopek effort and drive. But even the great Zatopek was a distance runner, not a sprinter, and I was merely a deskbound flak with fifty-three years on the odometer. They caught me in half a block, a man on either side clamping onto an arm just as a second van squealed to the curb beside us.

Breathless, I expected them to toss me inside. Instead, my escorts nimbly turned me back toward the first van, which was gunning toward us in reverse, straight down the sidewalk, its panel doors open. Behind me I heard the second van back on the move, and voices shouting in Russian. Some sort of brutal competition was under way, and I was the dubious prize.

My shoulder slammed against the floor of the first van as my two escorts shoved me inside. Both tumbled in with me, and everything went dark as the doors slammed shut. I heard the grunting of bodies landing atop me, the grind of the revving engine, the muffled shouts of our pursuers, and the thump-thump of the tires as we roared back onto the street across the curb. Then a drumroll across cobbles, another shout, followed by the shriek of a siren and heavy breathing from above. A needle plunged into my buttocks.

“Ow!”

I was about to say more when the world disappeared.

“How many fingers?”

An older fellow with gin blossoms and yellow teeth asked me that question. His face was only a foot from mine. He wore a gray pin-striped suit, tie loosened at the neck.

“Three,” I answered. I was groggy, just coming around.

“How many now?”

“Where the hell am I?”

“He’s fine,” a second man said from somewhere behind me. I twisted in the chair to see him but couldn’t turn more than a few inches because I was strapped around the waist and chest. My hands were bound at my sides, and my feet were bungee-corded to the legs of the chair.

“What the fuck is happening?”

“See? That stuff wears off in an hour, then it’s gone in seconds. Just like I told you.”

An hour. Then it must be close to nine p.m. I had a headache, but the guy was pretty much right, because I seemed to be thinking fairly clearly. I looked around at what I could see of the room. Small and antiseptic, somebody’s office. An American flag in the corner and a picture of the president on the wall. It didn’t look like the sort of place where someone would beat you, waterboard you, or hook up your genitals to electrodes, but these days I suppose you never knew for sure. The important thing was that there was no sign of either Ron Curtin or the Hammerhead.

The first fellow who’d held up his fingers backed away a few feet and inspected me with a rather forlorn expression, as if he’d seen better specimens.

“Should we give him coffee?”

“No. It’ll skew the results. Just wait another few minutes.”

“Could somebody please tell me where I am, and what this is all about? And maybe loosen these ropes.” My hands were numb.

The second man moved into view. Mid-twenties and full of himself. Black stretch pants and a black synthetic top, with his hair mussed. One of the guys who’d grabbed me, probably. The other fellow in the suit tilted his head in a pose of curiosity, but he no longer looked worried.

“I’m staying for the questioning.” he said.

“Of course.”

“I really need to pee,” I said.

“Give him some water. He probably needs a drink.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “that’ll help.”

“Get him a jar, or a glass from the canteen. I’ll unzip him.”

“Are you serious?”

He was. The suit left the room. The cocky young man in black squatted in front of me like a prostitute eager to conclude business and move on to the next customer. He unbuckled my belt and unzipped my trousers as I squirmed in the chair. Then he frowned, seemingly uncertain about what to do next.

“Scared to touch it, or worried I’ll get it all over you?”

“You right-handed?”

“What?”

“Are you right-handed?”

“Yes.”

He untied my right hand. The suit brought in a McDonald’s cup. Medium. The way my bladder felt, maybe they should’ve supersized. I flexed the wrist of my free hand, which tingled as the feeling returned, then went about my business while the young guy held the cup with surprising poise. If it hadn’t been such a relief I probably would’ve done something stupid and juvenile like spraying him.

The suit wrinkled his nose and took away the cup, which was filled alarmingly close to the brim. Then the other guy pushed up a small table to my right and set down a full glass of water, which I greedily drained.

“Got anything to eat?”

“Later.”

“Mind telling me where I am?”

“The U.S. embassy. You better be damn glad we got to you first.”

“Actually, that’s not how I remember it.”

“Okay, but we got you.”

“The other guys were Russian?”

“Just like old times, huh? And believe me, you wouldn’t be peeing into any cups with those guys.”

“A samovar, you think?”

“Funny. In your pants, more like it.”

“You guys are the best.”

But in spite of everything, I was relieved. Being abducted and then bound to a chair by my countrymen might still lead just about anywhere, I supposed, but it seemed preferable to the alternative.

“Does my father know I’m here?”

“He has no idea about any of this.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You’ll be released into his custody. Provided you cooperate.”

I exhaled slowly. By now my head was completely clear, and I felt better after the water. Maybe I would be all right.

The suit returned, this time with a man in a white lab coat carrying a silver hard-shell briefcase, which he placed on the table and snapped open. The guy in black removed the rest of my bindings and backed away toward the door. Then, without a word, the man in the lab coat unrolled a black band, wrapped it tightly around my right biceps, and secured it with Velcro, as if he was about to take my blood pressure. He secured two thinner bands around my chest and began connecting sensors to the fingers on my right hand.

They were hooking me up to a polygraph. I was about to be fluttered.

I suppose it could have been an aftereffect of the knockout drug, but for a moment I experienced a sensation close to dizziness. It was as if the room was in motion and I was whirling on a long comet tail of history, preparing to land at the very point where all of this had started half a century ago, when Dad had been in an identical position. They’d hooked him up to an older version of the same machine and placed him before an inquisitor, all in the name of security. A moment that changed our lives, and now I would relive it. But I doubted my captors felt that way. To them this was more like battlefield cleanup, carting the last litters of the wounded from a very old and dormant field of action.